Amazingly, because I love books based in Asia, this was the first book I'd read by Lisa See. I'm not sure why it has taken me so long!
I enjoyed this family saga about a Chinese girl, Li-Yan, who was born into a very poor Akha tea family in the Yunnan Province. I'd never heard of the Akha or their strict traditions before, so I was
fascinated to read this story.
The story soon takes a dark twist, as Li-Yan's mother is a midwife, and Li-Yan witnesses a birth of twin babies. Because the Akha follow 100-year-old traditions extremely faithfully, her mother kills the babies (twins are bad luck) and exiles their parents.
Clever, independent Li-Yan chafes against the misogynist, old-fashioned rules of her tribe, and when her own path takes a difficult turn, she leaves the village.
I won't say any more because I don't want to spoil the story, but I do want to say that Lisa See does an exceptional job tackling the complications of Chinese adoptions...and giving the reader a great appreciation for tea, especially the aged Pu-er tea.
I read this book for my book group, and I hosted the evening we discussed it. I ordered Chinese takeout and remembered I had intended to buy some Chinese tea for the occasion. On the off chance, I raided our tea cabinet, and what did I find? A box of Pu-er tea, which my husband had purchased on a whim. I was delighted at this lovely piece of synchronicity!
Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, elder daughter of the now-famous "tiger mom," whose book I recently read, has become a writer in her own stead. She's started a blog, "New Tiger in Town," and it's fabulous! I love her combination of intelligence, wit, sarcasm, and young spirit. Recently she posted about their recent photo shoot with live tigers for Time magazine. (Amy Chua was recently named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People. She's certainly garned a lot of fame and fortune from her recent book, along with the death threats!
I must say I love young Sophie's take on the recent publicity and her defense of her mom and dad...clearly she adores them. I'll be adding it to my blogs to read.
Kimberly Chang leaves Hong Kong to move to Brooklyn, New York, with her mother, and neither of them speak a word of English. They, like so many other immigrants, expect to find a wonderful land of promise waiting for them. Instead they find themselves buried in debt (owed to Kimberly's aunt and uncle), living in a roach- and rat-filled hovel without any heat, and working night and day--for pennies--in a sweatshop.
Kimberly is determined to escape, and she focuses all of her energies on learning English so that she can get back to being an outstanding student as she was in China. After she's finished with school, she goes to the sweatshop to work side by side with her mother, who had been a gifted music teacher back in Hong Kong.
Because of Kimberly's determination and innate intelligence, she is able to win a scholarship to an elite private high school. While there she constantly struggles with fitting in and managing to keep all the balls in the air. In the meantime, her mother struggles to learn English and has to work constantly to keep a filthy roof over their heads.
As Kimberly becomes a young woman, she falls in love with a young man, Matt, who also works in the factory. She's faced with a terrible choice between love or ambition.
Much of this novel is based on Jean Kwok's own experiences--she too was an immigrant from Hong Kong whose family ended up working in a sweatshop. Her family lived in a filthy, heatless, vermin-infested apartment. She too relied on her smarts to get her out of that difficult environment. Here is a video of Jean Kwok speaking about the novel:
Warning: SPOILER AHEAD!!
Many reviewers have commented that they did not like the ending. I'm guessing that they believe Kim should have chosen love instead of continuing to follow her path of pulling her family out of deep poverty. At the beginning of the book, I was concerned that she would have forsaken her ambitious dreams. What Kim only alludes to at the end is that she would not have made Matt happy.
This is a feminist novel to me, because the protagonist makes choices for her own independence. Never again does she want to have to rely on someone else (as she and her mother have been indebted and abused by her aunt and uncle). She is determined to change her life and give her mother the life she deserves. Matt is one of those traditional Asian men who would never abide his wife making more money than he does. I agree that it is sad that he never knows about her son...and sad also that Kimberly ends up alone...but I think it would have been far sadder had she given up her dreams.
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, by Amy Chua My rating: 3 out of 5 stars
I first heard about this book back in January when it lit up the blogosphere after an excerpt in the Washington Post titled "Why Chinese mothers are superior." As you can imagine, mothers came out of the woodwork, fiercely attacking her and defending their own parenting approaches. As much as I can understand their perspective, I also find it amusing when people attack each other's parenting styles. What they didn't quite understand about the book was that Chua meant it to be a parody of this parenting style. The front of the book says: "This is a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs. This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead, it's about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a 13-year-old."
Chua, who arrived in the U.S. as a very young child, was raised here by her immigrant parents, and she was convinced that her daughters would be far more successful (and happy) if she made all the choices for them. For example, they were never allowed to do the following things:
Attend a sleepover
Have a playdate
Be in a school play
Complain about not being in a school play
Watch TV or play computer games
Choose their own extracurricular activities
Get any grade less than an A
Not be the #1 student in every subject except gym and drama
Play any instrument other tan the piano or violin
Not play the piano or violin
Chua, a Yale law professor and writer married to a Jewish law professor, makes a bargain with her husband. They would raise the kids in the Jewish faith if she could apply Chinese parenting principles. Honestly, the man must be a saint. I don't know how he put up with it. She is far stricter, demanding, and (in my opinion) cruel than her parents were with her.
Her two long-suffering daughters could not have gotten much enjoyment out of their childhoods. They were too busy studying, learning Chinese, and practicing violin or piano. She hires a Chinese tutor for them (even though Chua herself does not speak Chinese). She comes across as a complete snob, telling her kids that other children (who are able to go to slumber parties or do not have to practice 4 to 5 hours a day) come from bad families. Anything less than the top performance is not acceptable. She rejects birthday cards her daughters make for her and tells them to do them over again.
A friend who lives in Maryland tells me that half of the kids in her children's school live like this. Their parents constantly pressure the schools to accelerate the curriculum well beyond the usual grade levels.
It's hard to tell, at times, whether Chua is making fun of herself or if she really believes what she did is right. For example, she calls her daughter "garbage" when Sophia acts disrespectfully toward her. When she mentions this conversation later at a dinner party, the other adults ostracize her. One guest breaks down in tears and has to leave early. So she must have known, on some level, the kind of reaction this book would get. Chua says that this approach worked "great" with her daughter. She speaks with admiration of the Chinese (or other) cultural more of insulting their children--for example, saying to an overweight child, "Hey fatty--lose some weight." In contrast, "Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of 'health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image."
She goes on to recount ONE anecdote of hearing a "western" father toasting his adult daughter by calling her "beautiful and incredibly competent," and the daughter later telling Chua that it made her "feel like garbage." I do not know anyone who would feel like garbage upon being told they were beautiful and incredibly competent. Chua likes to spout one-off anecdotes to defend her actions. Another one is the fact that her husband had been asked if he wanted to play the violin as a child, and he said no...and now he always regrets it. Hence, it's okay to FORCE your child to play the violin.
Each time Chua forces her daughters (often the younger, more defiant one, Lulu) to do something unreasonable, and hours of angry fights ensue, the daughters eventually cave in to Chua's ridiculous demands. She considers these triumphs as her rightful due as a mother, and feels justified in her methods.
Chua perhaps unintentionally pits Asian parenting styles against "western" parenting styles. She consistently puts down the latter. She writes "There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids' true interests." I find this comment pretty hilarious, because this is the best-known book about Asian mothers, and it does just that!
She truly believes that only she knows what would make her children happy--in the case of Lulu, "I wanted her to be the best violinist in the state--and that was for starters. I knew that was the only way Lulu could be happy."
I think Chua is a little bit crazy, actually. In the midst of her incredibly high-stress life (teaching law, writing books, going on lecture tours, on top of screaming and shouting at her daughters to practice all hours of the day), she decides to get a puppy. She chooses a Samoyed, and then begins to focus her competitive energy on her dog! As if one unruly puppy wasn't enough (she ended up doing all the dog walking and care on top of her other responsibilities), later she decides to get a second one.
During the course of the book's time period, she loses her mother-in-law, a vibrant, independent woman, and comes close to losing her beloved younger sister, Katrin, to leukemia. You would think that these experiences might prompt her to think more about her family's quality of life and her daughters' happiness. It can't have been fun or relaxing to live in a household constantly fraught by fights (usually about practicing the violin, and sometimes the piano). Why doesn't she realize how short her time with her daughters would be (while they were young) and make the most of it? Well, she says it herself: "The truth is I'm not good at enjoying life. It's not one of my strengths...I saw childhood as a training period, a time to build character and invest for the future. Florence (her mother-in-law) always wanted just one full day to spend with each girl--she begged me for that. But I never had a full day for them to spare. The girls barely had time as it was to do their homework, speak Chinese with their tutor, and practice their instruments." So Florence died without getting to spend a full day with her granddaughters. How sad is that??? Especially because Chua doesn't realize that it is sad.
When their beloved grandmother dies, Chua forces her grief-stricken adolescent daughters to give eulogies. When they protest, Chua demands it and pours on the guilt. She then rejects Sophia's first draft as totally unacceptable and calls her selfish. Both girls come through in the end, but it shocks me to think of how callous and unfeeling she was to demand that they speak at the funeral.
Chua writes about some of the arguments she had with her long-suffering husband, Jed, but for the most part he lingers in the background. In one argument, he accuses her of making crazy overgeneralizations about "westerners" and "Chinese people" and asks her to stop insulting people all the time. "I know you think you do people a huge favor by criticizing them, so that they can improve themselves, but have you ever considered that you just make people feel bad?" When he points out how wrong it is to praise Sophia in front of Lulu, she completely refuses to see his point, claiming that Lulu doesn't "need affirmative action."
The fights continue when she hosts a 50th birthday party for Jed. She demands, again, that Sophia and Lulu give speeches, and Lulu refuses. It is the first of many battles Chua loses, and she accuses Lulu of dishonoring the family. After Lulu hacks off all her hair after Chua tells her they don't have time for her to get a haircut, you'd think she might consider backing off...but no.
The simmering hostility begins bubbling and finally explodes when the family travels to Russia. Chua tries to force Lulu to sample caviar and calls her a juvenile delinquent and a barbarian when she refuses. Lulu throws a temper tantrum in the middle of the restaurant and tells her mother she hates her, her life, and her family. Chua tells her she's a terrible daughter. Finally, Chua realizes she must change.
She allows Lulu to give up the violin and take up tennis. But it's clear at the end of the book that she doesn't have any regrets and feels good about the way she has raised her daughters. That's why I'm not sure it's a parody. Everyone around her--her husband, daughters, parents-in-law, and even her own strict Chinese parents--tell her to chill out and back off, that she's going too far, but she refuses until Lulu ultimately explodes. She's extremely lucky that she didn't alienate her children forever.
Even though Chua and her husband are law professors, I wondered how they could afford their extravagant lifestyle. Full-time Chinese tutors (at least in early childhood), expensive piano and violin lessons, trips all around the world, constant dining out, and when Sophia performs at Carnegie Hall, a truly extravagant reception to which Sophia's entire class is bussed into the City?
In summary, this book was compulsively readable and a welcome break after The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, which took me weeks to finish. I admire Chua's honesty--she does expose herself to heaps of criticism. But I truly feel sorry for Chua's daughters and husband. She admits that her family is not the type who has intimate conversations about their feelings. She believes that her daughters are happy and well adjusted, but how would she know what they really feel about her? (After I wrote this review, a Facebook friend sent me this link to a letter written by Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, which defends her mother and says how much she loves her. Chua apparently has received death threats, so I understand why she wanted to defend her mom.)
Yes, she realizes she couldn't win, continuing the way she was going, but her closing pages smack of the kind of person who realizes, deep down, that she was right all along.
Ellie McEnroe is an Iraqi vet suffering from PTSD and addicted to painkillers and alcohol. She's living in Beijing after moving to China with her husband, Trey, who leaves her for a Chinese woman.
She hangs out with artists and leads an aimless existence, trying to escape from her own personal horrors from the war.
Somehow, she falls into trouble with both the Chinese government and some Americans (either the government or private contractors, it's unclear which). They chase her all over China, threatening her if she doesn't reveal what she knows about her artist friend's hideaway Uigur (Muslim Chinese), who he was sheltering in his apartment. Yet she knows nothing. In the meantime, her artist friend goes missing.
The book goes back and forth between present-day China (which, I can tell you, is NOTHING like the China I visited in December 1989), and her time in Iraq. Her husband keeps pestering her to sign divorce papers and to cooperate with the "authorities," who he seems to be affiliated with, even though she doesn't know what they need from her.
Ellie's method of communication is a virtual reality game, where friends of the artist (presumably) try to steer her in the right direction...but it's all very unclear what they need from her.
My mother-in-law commented that I seemed to be reading this book for a long period of time. It did seem that way.
It's not that it wasn't readable...I enjoyed reading the descriptions of "new" China, and it had some powerful messages about politics, power, and tyranny in the military and government.
Ellie was a bit of an enigma...we know she was a damaged soul after being traumatized in the war, and we know she was a product of a Christian small town, but we don't know much else about her childhood or upbringing. We don't know why she was not stronger to stand up against injustice.
Ultimately, I was disappointed. After I followed Ellie's journey throughout the book, I wanted more explanation at the end. I wanted to know who was following her and why, and why both the Chinese and the Americans were after her. Was it the American government, or people working for the government?
In the end, all we get are some vague hints. Perhaps that is a message in itself...but I found myself feeling cheated after I had followed Ellie all the way to the end.
In preparation for our trip to Vancouver, BC, last summer, I looked up books about Vancouver. Wayson Choy was one of the most frequently mentioned authors. I find that Canadian authors are not very widely read in the U.S., and I've found many Canadian gems.
The novel is divided into three sections, each telling the unique perspective of three siblings growing up in the Chinatown of Vancouver. It touches on many issues of race, family, rivalry, the battle between the old ways and the new ways, discrimination, war, and homosexuality.
I found many parts of the novel interesting (for example, the young girl's unique friendship with an older, disfigured Chinese man, or the affair between the Chinese girl and the Japanese boy), but it dragged in other parts. In some sections Choy included far too many characters for the reader to follow. I didn't get the same feeling of place as I did in reading Vancouver.
I have Choy's autobiography out of the library, but I'm not sure whether I'll read it just yet. This book didn't grip me enough as it could have.
After recently hearing Tsukiyama speak in person, I decided to go back and read her novels in order. This is an excellent first novel, about the lives of women in China working in the silk trade. I loved it! Excellent story of women's friendship.
Last year I got the opportunity to hear Tsukiyama speak at a banquet for the Willamette Writers in Portland. She is half Japanese-American and half Chinese-American, and most of her books center around Japan or China. After hearing her speak, I read her first novel, Women of the Silk (about women who worked in the silk factories in China) and loved it. The Language of Threads picks up where Women of the Silk left off.
I can see that Tsukiyama's writing has only improved in the interval between the two books. The Language of Threads is the continuing story of former silk worker, Pei, as she escapes to Hong Kong and endures WWII under the Japanese occupation. She continues to form strong friendships and thrive in the midst of the chaos around her.
Pei's story is unusual in literature about China for two reasons: (1) women rely on each other more than they rely on men...it's a hopeful story about women sticking together through turmoil, and (2) the books have positive male characters (as well as negative). I also find it interesting to consider Tsukiyama's ethnic background, 1/2 Chinese and 1/2 Japanese, and wonder about her own inner turmoil as she writes about what her Japanese ancestry did to her Chinese ancestry around the time of the war.
Well worth the time! If you read this one, I strongly enourage you to read Women of the Silk first.
I have finally given up on this book, 3/4 of the way through, which is highly unusual for me.
I really wanted to like it--the plot sounded interesting, about a Japanese woman who grew up in China and became a successful actor there during the war, and then reinvented herself in Japan and also in the U.S. with different identities throughout her life. The story is based on the life of the real-life Ri Koran.
However. The author, famous Japan expert Ian Buruma, uses three different male narrators to tell her story. The effect is that the reader never really gets very close to Yamaguchi Yoshiko...because of the distance created by this type of narration. Buruma also throws in tons of minor characters, and frankly, I just had a hard time staying interested toward the end.
The novel is divided into three parts, and I read through the first two and began scanning through the third one when I finally decided to give up.
I did leave it with two stars, however, because I'm interested in almost anything about Japan and China...and I found it intriguing to read about life in Japan during the occupation.
But this could have been done so much better. I agree with Japan resident and author Suzanne Kamata's review of this book...the only reason I took a chance on it was because of my interest in Japan and China. Unfortunately, I regret that I wasn't reading something more captivating!
